saram

Our pups love chewing on wood! Branches, furniture, pencils, wooden toys - it's driving me bonkers. I'm concerned about splinters particularly if they swallow the wood, is this a problem or will it break down in their gut. Are there safe wooden chews? Thanks

If you go to one of the online pet stores they will have all the wormers there that you can compare. We were tossing up between revolution (put on the back of the neck) and sentinal (chewable tablet) It's hard as neither of them cover everything. Our vet gave us a sample pack of the revolution when we brought our puppies home? Maybe you could ask if they have any samples?

Thanks!

Oh I would love to join in. I have just registered on flickr, how do I find DOL?

Thinking about this all the time, as obviously in the end a lot of the behaviours I'm working on I want to be habits and not rewarded. I tend to use the similar tact to what I have been told to do with kids praise always - reward at a high rate in the beginning but then come down to random reward rate, so you are offering rewards at random (obviously when the behaviour is beening performed) This has been shown to have good rates of retention with humans so hoping it works on dogs too :-)

thinking of you! Hope you have some good news tomorrow

We are going through similar issues with our boys but they tend to only "fight" over high value items - raw meat, treat ball etc regular dinner is fine. We have always fed them together - as small pups they would often happily switch bowls but we have always redirected them back to their original bowl to make sure one doesn't eat the others etc. Now they are quite happy to eat togethr out of their own bowl. We have done TOT with each seperately. I take turns in who goes out first as we are not setting dominence. One of the pups carries on a bit when I take the other out and we pop him in his crate for some time out if he doesn't settle after being told no. Basically what I have leanrt from this forum and reading else where is that dogs will fight when dominence is unsettled which causes stress so we have taken the stand that we are the dominent dog and they are both on equal footing and it is working very well. We are also getting a trainer out in the next week to give us some more long term suggestions to help keep them friendly so I will pass on any interesting tidbits. all the best

Not necessarily, our vet wormed our cat twice before we picked her up and we had to worm her again 2 days later??? She was a stray

One of our pups had very runny poos on and off for the first week or two - we did try and use the same food as where we got them from and then slowly change over to what we wanted to use. We also found out he was eating eggplant from our vege garden which I think is what was causing the runny poos. Our vet also mentioned introducing "human" food could cause the runs if they weren't mature enough for it

Yep we are in QLD and just checked the website and it doesn't say anything about having to be registered before starting :-) So looking forward to getting out of the house with the pups

Our pups love them and at 16wks those bones don't last long at all. I'm pretty sure raw chicken bones are easily digested so there isn't the same danger of damage to the intestines from spurs and such but I'm guessing pups like kids digestive systems work faster than adults so sometimes the food comes out looking similar to what it went in looking like IYKWIM

I think that could be messy I believe the idea if you want to lead them to a particular area is to keep them on lead only in that area - not sure haven't tried it myself

Oh that's easy done they've both already been castrated. I wonder if I have to register them before we go to obedience classes??? Hope not, as it is we have been told we might have to wait a month for a place in the classes

We just say toilet for everything and have also found that by poopa scooping the messes and taking them to a particualr area of the yard they always go to that area. We do have a high rainfall and very active dung beetles so it's not an issue for us to have an area of grass to dump doggy doo-doo.

Oh really - What sorts of things? Is this the "register" you have to belong to before you can participate? Would love to hear about the red tape so to speak before we get our hopes up